Here is a column from TIME magazine's special edition written the day after the attacks. Some here will like it and some will hate it, but it certainly expresses what many Americans were feeling right after the attack: Sorry for the length but I don't know how to do links:
The Case for Rage and Retribution
Whatâs needed is a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple
American fury â a ruthless indignation that doesnât leak away in a
week or two
BY LANCE MORROW
Wednesday, Sep. 12, 2001
For once, letâs have no âgrief
counselorsâ standing by with banal
consolations, as if the purpose, in
the midst of all this, were merely to
make everyone feel better as
quickly as possible. We shouldnât
feel better.
For once, letâs have no fatuous
rhetoric about âhealing.â Healing is
inappropriate now, and dangerous.
There will be time later for the tears of misfortune note.
A day cannot live in infamy without the
nourishment of rage. Letâs have rage.
Whatâs needed is a unified, unifying,
Pearl Harbor sort of purple American
furyâa ruthless indignation that doesnât
leak away in a week or two, wandering
off into Prozac-induced forgetfulness or
into the next media sensation (O.J. â¦
Elián ⦠Chandra â¦) or into a corruptly
thoughtful relativism (as has happened
in the recent past, when, for example,
you might hear someone say, âTerrible
what he did, of course, but, you know,
the Unabomber does have a point,
doesnât he, about modern technology?â).
Let America explore the rich reciprocal
possibilities of the fatwa. A policy of
focused brutality does not come easily to
a self-conscious, self-indulgent,
contradictory, diverse, humane nation
with a short attention span. America
needs to relearn a lost discipline,
self-confident relentlessnessâand to
relearn why human nature has equipped
us all with a weapon (abhorred in decent
peacetime societies) called hatred.
As the bodies are counted, into the
thousands and thousands, hatred will
not, I think, be a difficult emotion to
summon. Is the medicine too strong?
Call it, rather, a wholesome and
intelligent enmityâthe sort that impels
even such a prosperous, messily tolerant
organism as America to act. Anyone who
does not loathe the people who did these
things, and the people who cheer them
on, is too philosophical for decent
company.
Itâs a practical matter, anyway. In war, enemies are enemies. You
find them and put them out of business, on the sound principle that
thatâs what they are trying to do to you. If what happened on
Tuesday does not give Americans the political will needed to
exterminate men like Osama bin Laden and those who conspire
with them in evil mischief, then nothing ever will and we are in for
a procession of black Tuesdays.
This was terrorism brought to near perfection as a dramatic form.
Never has the evil business had such production values. Normally,
the audience sees only the smoking aftermath
âthe blown-up embassy, the ruined barracks, the ship with a
blackened hole at the waterline. This time the first plane striking
the first tower acted as a shill. It alerted the media, brought
cameras to the scene so that they might be set up to record the
vivid surreal bloom of the second strike (âAm I seeing this?â), and
thenâcould they be such engineering geniuses, so deft at
demolition?âthe catastrophic collapse of the two towers, one after
the other, and a sequence of panic in the streets that might have
been shot for a remake of The War of the Worlds or for
Independence Day. Evil possesses an instinct for theater, which is
why, in an era of gaudy and gifted media, evil may vastly magnify
its damage by the power of horrific images.
It is important not to be transfixed. The police screamed to the
people running from the towers, âDonât look back!ââa biblical
warning against the power of the image. Terrorism is sometimes
described (in a frustrated, oh-the-burdens-of-great-power tone of
voice) as âasymmetrical warfare.â So what? Most of history is a
pageant of asymmetries. It is mostly the asymmetries that cause
history to happenâan obscure Schickelgruber nearly destroys
Europe; a mere atom, artfully diddled, incinerates a city. Elegant
perplexity puts too much emphasis on the âasymmetricalâ side of
the phrase and not enough on the fact that it is, indeed, real
warfare. Asymmetry is a concept. War is, as we see, blood and
death.
It is not a bad idea to repeat a line from the 19th century French
anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Prou-dhon: âThe fecundity of the
unexpected far exceeds the prudence of statesmen.â America, in
the spasms of a few hours, became a changed country. It turned
the corner, at last, out of the 1990s. The menu of American
priorities was rearranged. The presidency of George W. Bush
begins now. What seemed important a few days ago (in the media,
at least) became instantly trivial. If Gary Condit is mentioned once
in the next six months on cable television, I will be astonished.
During World War II, John Kennedy wrote home to his parents
from the Pacific. He remarked that Americans are at their best
during very good times or very bad times; the in-between periods,
he thought, cause them trouble. Iâm not sure that is true. Good
times sometimes have a tendency to make Americans squalid. The
worst times, as we see, separate the civilized of the world from the
uncivilized. This is the moment of clarity. Let the civilized toughen
up, and let the uncivilized take their chances in the game they
started.
